Wierd Noble really came out to play yesterday afternoon. A few minutes before my 1p.m. class, I was reviewing the activities I had planned (dialogues meant to illustrate the difference between preterit & imperfect verbs in a narration) when I just got the sudden desire to WRITE! So I just started writing the beginning to 5 different stories in Spanish with the vague notion that I would scrap my former plans in order to have students interpret and add to the narratives instead ...
Well, I think it was a good idea except that I wrote in rather advanced Spanish (for 102) and each of the narratives was NUTS. One was about a guy named Joaquín who abandons his life and takes his dog "Bounce" on a road trip to Death Valley, only to find himself waylaid in a north Texas town called "Pueblo de los poetas." Another was about a Danish Olympian named Gerardo who --one day during his retirement -- dresses in the red-and-white cross of Denmark for an invited TV interview to which he never arrives because Copenhagen has become an abandoned ghost town. Yet another was about a wealthy single American, Julia, who finds herself on a solo vacation at a Brazilian surfers beach ... and I think the last one was about a kid growing up in rural Missouri in the early 50s with sharecropper parents who finds unopened letters ...
Anyway, you can imagine that the class was just sort of like, uuuuh, huh? ... so the activity took forever to explain. When I'm in a wierd mood, they sometimes just look at me like, What the hell? I have the strangest teacher. I think I finally told some of the groups they could just take the story in whatever direction they wanted. The group with Julia had NO clue what to do, so I told them just have Julia find a genie's lamp and go from there.
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